


Ephemeron

by cullionly



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bitter and Resentful Sollux, Depression, Just General Unhappiness, Lifespan Angst, Lifespan Gap, M/M, Mayfly December Romance, Non-Explicit Sex, Sadstuck, Undisclosed Everybody Knows Each Other Human-Troll Hybrid AU, Unhappy marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 04:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cullionly/pseuds/cullionly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It occurred to you that, in the vast roster of personalities and ways of being that gives people their own uniquely dickish personalities, you had not been given the trait of Thinking Ahead, when you were about fourteen hours from getting married and upon you came a realization which you found very difficult to ignore with the Most Important Day A’ Your Life [sic] being in such close proximity to yourself.</p><p>Later, this lack of trait would manifest in your utter ignorance of the fact that you would leave your Dashing Husband cold and alone for thousands of sweeps while you float off to wherever death takes you. </p><p>This story is about the sweeps you spent slowly realizing that you were dying much faster than him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ephemeron

_I’ll sing of the walls of the well and the house at the top of the hill_

_I’ll sing of the bottles of wine that we left on our old windowsill_

_I’ll sing of the years you will spend getting sadder and older_

_Oh love, and the cold, the oncoming cold_

[[x](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7tkCJiHQM0)]

 

 

            It occurred to you that, in the vast roster of personalities and ways of being that gives people their own uniquely dickish personalities, you had not been given the trait of Thinking Ahead, when you were about fourteen hours from getting married and upon you came a realization which you found very difficult to ignore with the Most Important Day A’ Your Life [sic] being in such close proximity to yourself.

            The realization came in two doses. The first: that you’re a complete and utter moron, a failure, a slimeball and a grandiose disappointment that does not really deserve to be moving into a castle at the top of the hill with his Loving and Not At All A Massive Piss-Off matesprit. Such a revelation had not been so jarring nor uncommon, because you have a tendency to flip-flop (as with everything) between “He doesn’t deserve me” and “I don’t deserve him.”

            Usually, it’s somewhere between the two, leaning towards the former, but fourteen hours from your wedding? You don’t deserve him. The reason? You hadn’t sent out your wedding invitations.

            He had entrusted you with two tasks for the entire process: send the invitations, and rent your own tuxedo. He would take care of the rest, he had assured you: the cake, the venue, the transportation, the bridesmaid dresses (he hadn’t taken care of the bridesmaid dresses, you know damn well he just asked Kanaya to deal with it and she had rolled her eyes and decidedly not taken care of it, which you are very aware of, but Eridan was still of the opinion that she had spent the entire perigree slaving over the perfect dress choice and would show up with a gaggle of spectacularly dressed Good Friends Of Yours and split off in equal numbers behind you and him so as to not imply that you have more friends than he does. (You totally do.))

            The reason that you hadn’t sent out the invitations is because you had, instead, made an uglyMugbook page (it’s a waste of paper and everybody’s on uglyMugbook), which was regarded largely as a joke by your Wonderful Friends (Hah! Like that would last as long as troll Kim Kardashian’s sad official matespritship/The prospect of that would be even more lewd and scandalous than your already lewd and scandalous relationship/Fuck you guys, I thought you were serious for a minute.) You had tried your damndest to convince them that yes, you actually were planning having some stupid ceremony to celebrate the fact that you had made the impetuous and irrational decision (again, due to the absence of Thinking Ahead) of being some moron that makes veins bulge from your forehead more often than not’s Official Boyfriend Forever, but they remained convinced that, until they received a white paper invitation saying Mr. Sollux Ampora, you’re a lying two-brained whack job who needs to visit John to get advice on Hilarious Pranks (Sure, Sollux, I’ll totally teach you the ways of the pranking masters.) Thanks, you had typed back. I’m glad you guys are so supportive of me.

            To rub salt in your uglyMugbook wound, to convince the actual, decent friends (ie. a whopping total of Feferi and Gamzee) that you were pulling a shit-level prank on them, and that they should not be at That One Really Nice Chapel at 12:00 sharp next perigree, dressed in their outfits that had Totally Been Taken Care Of, Vriska had made a Super Fun Event!!!!!!!! at the same time and day, as if the prospect of you marrying your matesprit of a grotesquely long amount of time was so preposterous that the only way to kick sense into you was with a beach volleyball tournament in which Tavros would play the role of the volleyball and the only vows being exchanged were vows of “I will crush your dirty flapping sidehair into the pearlescent rolling sand, you asswave.”

           

            And thus, you had complained, as you do about everything, to your matesprit, and he had started shaking and spitting, not at the prospect of your Dear Friends refusing to believe your wedding being indeed a thing that was to occur, but at the prospect of you making an uglyMugbook page for the event.

            So you had agreed to send out proper invitations to your friends and friends of friends and co-workers and lusii. (Gl’bgolyb wasn’t on the list (because, Fef, she lives underwater.))

            You hadn’t done it.

            You had assumed that your friends would come around.

            They didn’t come around.

           

            And so, after you dealt with the cake that had been thrown on you and a diva scene worthy of the largest and most brittle plastic crown, you had spent your wedding ceremony in front of rows of empty chairs, while a drone made you kiss, which was equal parts intimidating and creepy, and you ate your cake in tight-lipped silence, until you, in a last-ditch effort to salvage some scraps of positivity, took a very large and calculated risk and smeared icing on his nose.

            He dropped his fork, taking your heart with it, but, as you were preparing to use the platter as a makeshift shield, he had cracked a little smile through his old and crusty This Is A Disaster You Ruined My Life tears, smeared icing on your nose, and started laughing.

 

            After the ceremony, you piled into the limousine, still wiping tears off of Eridan’s face with an embroidered napkin, and you had gone to your new hive, the castle at the top of the hill with a big bottle of champagne waiting for you on the counter that you popped and drank and cried into and tasted on each other’s mouths as the sky got brighter and your mind got hazier.

            It all worked out. Perigrees later, your friends realized that you were, in fact, married, and felt guilty enough to attend another reception (sans actual marriage).

            Everything works out, as long as you’re adamant enough about improvising. That’s how you first realized that you live your life, making shit up as you go along, letting the doomed stuff be Fucked Forever, and resigning totally with the belief that what is meant to work out, will work out.

            The second dose of your Thrilling Realization came when you and your Loving And Not Irritating Matesprit were re-watching the trite and bitter video of your wedding vows in front of all your friends for the umpteenth time to instill a crushing guilt inside of their Cold and Black Hearts when they are forced to see the Beautiful and Soulful Eridan Tears cascading onto the ground (to his credit, most of them do feel pretty bad about the whole thing, but it always comes back to your failure to send the invitations (you’d gotten the milk twenty-six weeks in a row because of that, among many, many other things. (Sex things. They were mostly sex things. (After you put the milk in the fridge, he requires you to perform some form of Sexy Hot Oral Sex Activity on him, which you do, because you’re past the point of arguing, and because if you try, he’ll pop in the DVD and pause on the Beautiful and Soulful Eridan Tears to remind you of how badly you fucked up.)))), and when the video is cranked up to full volume to shake the entire hive with the Pitiable Eridan Sniffles and the Sweet and Romantic Sollux Tear Wiping Gestures, you can hear your vows clearly.

            You had said “I promise to love you and cherish you until the day I die.”

            He had said “I promise to love you and cherish you until the day you die.”

            Your knee-jerk reaction is to slap him in the head, until The Second Realization fully sinks in and you realize, yet again, that you are an idiot lacking the capability to Think Ahead, and he, for the first time, is right.

            The thing is, Eridan is a notorious list-maker. You fully endorse the concept, though you’re shit at making them and only do them when he sits you down with a whiteboard and makes you write down the Shit You Need To Do. It really helps you organize your thoughts, but you can’t be assed to do them because you’re a lazy pile of sloths and because you don’t like admitting that he’s right (you do though, lots of the time, not as much as he admits that you’re right, because you’re always right.) Eridan makes lists of stupid shit. He makes lists of all the different whale species that he wants to harpoon in his lifetime, all the planets he wants to visit in his lifetime (Hogwarts isn’t a planet, dumbshit/I know that, you bastard, that’s why I need to start colonizin’ soon so I can make it a goddamn planet), the things he wants to learn in his lifetime, the pets he wants to own in his lifetime, the awards that he plans to win in his lifetime, the books he wants to read in his lifetime, the famous people he wants to meet in his lifetime, the blah blah he wants to blah blah in his lifetime, lifetime, lifetime, lifetime.

            There is a recurring theme.

            He knows exactly how many sweeps he has until he should feasibly die of old age, assuming regular circumstances, and he plans accordingly.

            When you got married, he shifted all the Romantic Tunnel Of Love Planets to the top 50-some of his Planets to Visit During Our Annual Vacation list.

            In retrospect, it perplexes you that you aren’t the realist in the situation- you’d pegged Eridan rather than yourself to be the one in a deep denial that you’re going to die with a fair bit of haste, but you’re not a Thinking Aheader, and he is. Or maybe you don’t have to think ahead, because you’ll be dead. Whatever.

 

            The fact is, you get very sad very quickly. He tells you, when you’re curled together on the couch with a wintertime fireplace coughing and sputtering in the background, post-coitus,  naked and really fucking cold, that he always dreams about those empty chairs, the rows and rows of empty chairs staring at him when you were in tuxedos and crying and having a Really Shitty Wedding, but in his dreams, they’re his funeral, and in his dreams, they’re his funeral chairs and they’re empty because he lives so damn long that all his friends are long since dead.

            You’re pissed that you’re not the realist, so you tell him something pretty real; you tell him that that’s probably how it’s going to work out. He starts crying.

           

            That’s sort of how your life goes for the next twenty-some sweeps. You stop fighting because you’re both really scared that you’ll die before you get the chance to make up, and somehow, the result is that you’re both sadder than ever, because it forces a cripplingly grey apathy onto you both, forces you to swallow down every little thing that you say to each other with a grim smile until you pretend not to be sitting on a boiling cauldron of resentment that manifests in too-hard bites and pushing yourself inside of him way too fast when you Make Tender Love. You gain satisfaction when he can’t stand up without biting his lip the next morning. You hate yourself for it.

            As it gets closer to The Day, he starts guilt tripping you (like it will stop you from dying), and you start to resent him so much you don’t care that he’s going to lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling fighting back the urge to swallow all your leftover heart medicine once you’re dead. You’re not even sure if he’s doing it on purpose, but he always brings up stories of the time you spent when you were Happy, how you used to plant potatoes together and accidentally dig them up the  next year, and how there was a time where you couldn’t cook very well, but he’d taught you, and you’d learned for him, and all the weeks you spent kissing under sunsets of his Romantic Planet Vacations, the cats that have cycled through your Home Together- Home Together is the word that he uses, not hive, Home Together, the home of your goddamn Life Together, the home that you’ve spent your thirty sweeps of Perfectly Fine Marriage raising cats and planting potatoes and resigning to the fact that he’s going to bury you fairly soon and then move on to somebody else, and you’ll just be a speck in his long life, just His First Husband in another list.

            You think about fighting with him, but you’re too tired and sad and you’ve lived this apathetic and dull life of loving him because it’s easier than trying not to, and if you try and push him away, he’ll just sigh and help you to bed, make you swallow some medicine to make you feel even more awful than you ever thought possible (It makes my bones hurt, you inisist to Eridan, don’t make me take it. (He tells you no, every time. No, sweetheart, you’ve gotta take it.)) because you’ve gotten weaker and paler and a look a great deal like a ghost, though he insists that you are The Most Beautiful Person Alive, you don’t agree with any of the three.

            He’s always been very adamant about kissing you every day before you go to sleep, as some sort of relationship therapy that obviously doesn’t work, and you have a slight bit of respect for him for that, because your lips are cold and taste like a concoction of Pill Salad, and his are warm and although you don’t get old and wrinkly like the humans did (you were afraid that you would, even though you aren’t that vain (you went ten human years without seeing Dave and couldn’t recognize him when Terezi told you)) but there’s an oldness with you, and a youthfulness to Eridan; he’s soft and his motions are smooth with energy, even though they’re bogged down with the same overwhelming sadness afflicting you, your bones stick out and you have trouble getting up and down the stairs without leaning on the handrail.

 

            At some point, when you’re pretty fucking old and you swear you can’t live another second under such a crippling sadness, you Talk About It. Eridan gets you to open up and vomit up every single feeling you have, how you swear you love him, but you’ve started delighting in seeing him cry so much that sometimes you push the stack of magazines off the bathroom counter and pretend to fall down so that he’ll come sprinting up the stairs with fear in his eyes thinking that you’ve had heart attack, and then cry tears of relief and hold you when you lie and say that you just tripped. He doesn’t get mad when you tell him this. He tells you that it’s because you want remember that he loves you, which he does.

            Most of the conversation makes you feel ultra-guilty, and even more like an Unforgivable Pile of Garbage. You tell him that it’s so frustrating not having him yell at you that you always bait him, always do little things to sabotage him like eating his packed lunch before he goes to work in the morning so he has to go hungry, or taking the laces out of his shoes, or dropping subtle reminders that Aradia and Tavros and the humans are all dead, and you’re next.

            You tell him that it doesn’t feel like you’re together anymore. You loved fighting, you loved how he would get passionate and zealous and throw things and you would flip tables and usually end up pretending that you were So Over It and making food while trying to cover up that your hands were still shaking, or he would storm out and you’d find him crying by the old well that came with the house and hold his hand until you Fell Madly In Love again (if you gave it enough time- if you didn’t, you’d find him pacing the length between the carrot plot and the potato plot. He did it so much that there were lines of dirt cut into the grass where it could no longer grow. (It has since grown over. You’re not really a sentimental person, but it turns your heart to a lump in your throat when you look out the window and see overgrown grass where his Pacing Tracks used to be.))

            It’s what you are, you tell him. You’re fighters. You do things obsessively, meticulously, competitively and passionately. That’s why you started loving each other in the first place, and now that that fire is gone, you’re just floating; you’re just the smoke and mirrors of you and him and him and you.

            He heeds your advice and slaps you in the face, and screams that if you were the one who had to deal with a thousand sweeps of guilt over your last memories of him being a slammed door and a steak knife wedged deeply into the area of the wall next to the front door that still sports a hundred cuts, you’d damn well keep your mouth shut when he tells you that you’re nothing but a melodramatic and pathetic drama queen, you’d damn well nod when he tells you that you’re stupid and you’re selfish and you deserve to have an empty funeral because that’s how many people will care that you’re dead. (You’ve said all of those things. (You don’t deserve him.))

            He screams that he stopped being such an asshole for you. That he loves you so much he learned the one thing on the very bottom of his list of Things To Learn: patience and understanding. He says that you need to understand that he’d do anything for you.

            Eridan’s always been the one to work at your relationship, you know that. When he proposed the Kissing Every Day shtick, you’d gone along with it, whatever, you don’t really care. If he doesn’t kiss you, you’ll be sad because he’s not there, and if he does, you’ll be sad because it reminds you of how he’s warm and you’re cold.

            You ask him why he doesn’t just leave you. You’re selfish and mean, and you haven’t made him happy in ages, and he’s young and beautiful and he knows Patience and Understanding and he can put up with the worst of all people (you), and thus, logically speaking, there are a lot of people that could love him and treat him like he’s wonderful (he is).

            He says he doesn’t think so. He also says he loves you, with such a heavy emphasis on the ‘you’ part, like it’s preposterous that he could ever love anybody else. It jars you a bit, because you always figured that he had a list of people he wanted to marry in his lifetime.

            You ask him if he’s going to kill himself after you die. No, he says, but I’ll think about it.

            That’s when you realize that he does love you (you you you). You try to pick him up and drop him on your lap and kiss him like you used to when you were Happy, but your legs almost snap under the pressure of him, and he rolls over to drag you on his lap instead. Sometimes he treats you like Studio Glass, but you tell him to stop it and be rough with you so that you’ll toughen up a bit. He nods and shoves you against the armrest of the couch and bends over you, and you have to tell him to stop halfway through your Sentimental Couch Sex, because he’s fucking you with your legs bent between your bodies, and it hurts your pelvis so much that you almost scream (in the bad way). He doesn’t seem to mind; you’re both old enough that you’re not horny little kids, and he likes holding you and stroking your dry and brittle hair.

            You sort of fall in love again that night, like you suffered from Love Amnesia and you suddenly remembered, all at once, how much you really do care about him and want to make him happy. It’s quite shocking that he still loves you, because you never stopped being an asshole for him.

            So your relationship goes back to being like when you were kids, but it’s too late; you’re old and bitter with bags under your eyes to commemorate the best sleep of your life, and loving him so fiercely means that you feel guilty every time you go to bed, because what if you don’t wake up? And so you sit on the edge of the mattress before you sleep every single time, thanking God that you’ve made it through another night, and you end up crying quietly because you’re certain that you’ll never see the morning light pass through your chiffon curtains again, that this is it, and Eridan shuffles to press against your back and wrap an arm around your waist and he whispers that he loves you now, and he’ll love you in the morning when (when) you wake up.

            You keep your mouth shut, because he stopped being an asshole for you and you want to stop being an asshole for him, but there’s one instance, when your hair has long since lightened and turned to a sort of dull grey and your skin is full of sunken shadows and even your horns are dull and brittle, when you tell him that he’s a liar.

            I love you, he repeats, squeezing around your waist. Sollux, you know I love you.

            Until the day I die, you say back, always thinking of his vows. That’s it.

**Author's Note:**

> As with lots of my fics, there is a related piece of art [here.](http://cullionly.tumblr.com/post/49463455726/lifespan-gaps-done-alongside-this-fic-on-ao3) This was written in a fairly experimental style, so I would love to hear what you think!


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